Nothing much to like about today’s strip aside from the fact that, after getting smirked at by Les “Two Rackets” Moore for three days running, it’s finally Funky’s turn to rock the ol’ Amazon logo grin.

At least Pluggers usually employs a gentle, joshing point of view regarding aging. Les responds to Funky’s remark with a look of pure contempt. Maybe because he’s being called “an old man” by someone who’s a doppelgänger for his own octogenarian father. I guess some old men were left behind.

Les’ rage face is 1) just ugly enough to define the character, and 2) definitely getting saved in my PhotoShop folder. To paraphrase Piter DeVries, “I can think of many pleasures with this image. It is perhaps better that you die in the belly of a worm.”
You can’t go wrong quoting Brad Dourif.

The interesting thing about this one is how it aptly demonstrates how BatNom’s lofty “artistic ambitions (and his even loftier self-opinions regarding those ambitions) are a big pile of doot. FW is supposedly a serialized strip unfolding in “real time”. Yet Les, who always exercises, is still “trying” to get in shape and Funky, who also always exercises, is still a fat dying tub of goo. In other words, it’s still a gag-a-day strip no matter what he says or thinks. The same old gags, over and over.

And that’s not entirely a bad thing, mind you, as he’s actually better at this than he is at “storytelling”, by a lot in fact. And that’s one of my key gripes regarding the strip in general, as I believe it’s far more difficult to write a reasonable joke every day than it is to throw together some slapdash piece of tripe about a comic book company or ripping off “Love Story” for cheap pathos. But that’s just my (ahem) opinion.

Batiuk would’ve been so much better off if he hadn’t been so fixated on “rising above” humor and gags. I’m pretty sure he told someone once he wanted to make comics (probably someone who looks an awful lot like Mary Sue Sweetwater) and that someone laughed and said comics were silly. And since that day, he’s been obsessed with wreaking revenge on those who once mocked him.